I am senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News. I write about energy and environment issues, frequently focusing on global warming. I have presented environmental analysis on CNN, CNN Headline News, CBS Evening News, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and several national radio programs. My environmental analysis has been published in virtually every major newspaper in the United States. I studied atmospheric science and majored in government at Dartmouth College. I obtained my Juris Doctorate from Syracuse University.

It is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. “In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”

Another group of scientists fit the “Fatalists” model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the respondents, “diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling.” These scientists are likely to ask, “How can anyone take action if research is biased?”

The next largest group of scientists, comprising 10 percent of respondents, fit the “Economic Responsibility” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the ‘nature is overwhelming’ adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate. In their prognostic framing, they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol and all regulation will do to the economy.”

The final group of scientists, comprising 5 percent of the respondents, fit the “Regulation Activists” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life.” Moreover, “They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate.”

Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.

One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’

Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists. We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe.

People who look behind the self-serving statements by global warming alarmists about an alleged “consensus” have always known that no such alarmist consensus exists among scientists. Now that we have access to hard surveys of scientists themselves, it is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.

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The survey the author cites isn’t “scientists” as stated in the title of the op-ed, it is a survey of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta. That’s like surveying tobacco company CEO’s about the dangers of smoking. It would be a reasonable piece about the opinion of petroleum engineers in Alberta if that was made clear, instead that was hidden. I wonder why?

Just how do you define “scientists” as there is no academic criteria to define such a role? And just how are geologist related to tobacco?

Just like calling AGW “deniers” instead of skeptics, of which is what they are, is just more name calling and smear campaigns. Why not try and actually argue the merits of your case instead of resorting to playground antics. It only makes you seem desperate.

I am a licensed Professional Geologist like the ones they surveyed in this “study”. I am not a climate scientist. My opinion on this subject is derived from those that actually conduct research on climate change. A survey of engineers or geologists like myself should not be considered indicative of any consensus of climate scientists on this subject. This study is flawed and misleading. Why not just take a survey of circus clowns while you’re at it?

You don’t have to wonder why. All you have to ask is who is funding the Heartland Institute. The list begins with the tobacco industry and runs through a gamete of oil corporations and even include the pharm industry. They will say anything that these corporations want. For a closer look at this corporate sponsored propaganda machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heartland_Institute

If you had bothered to read the article it also states that Meterologists surveyed displayed similar results.

Geophysicists have an understanding of oceanic, atmospheric and other natural cyclic processes as they’re directly related to the erosion and evolution of geological processes.

Perhaps you should think before you post and accept that catastrophic Man Made Global Warming is a scientifically baseless scam and the majority of scientists realise this. However anyone with an IQ over 50 knows that it’s about money and control, and nothing to do with real science.

Of course humans affect climate, but how much is the question- If you stacked 1 million pennies, the stack would be as tall as 4 Empire State Buildings, stacked end to end, almost exactly, (4983 feet) Let’s say that stack represents all of the effect from green house gas on the planet and you wanted to improve that by removing the human race… That would take 12 cents off the top.

“Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies.”

Mr. Taylor,

As in previous weeks, your editorial rests on misrepresentation of the facts. As billb notes, the survey was conducted by APEGA, a professional organization of engineers and geoscientists in the province of Alberta. According to the study you cite:

“[T]he petroleum industry – through oil and gas companies, related industrial services, and consulting services – is the largest employer, either directly or indirectly, of professional engineers and geoscientists in Alberta.”

Failing to mention this fact is a clear case of misrepresentation. Why are you so eager to mislead Forbes readers? Obviously these survey results cannot honestly be extrapolated to engineers and geoscientists in general as you are trying to do.

“By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.”

27.4% believe it is caused by primarily natural factors (natural variation, volcanoes, sunspots, lithosphere motions, etc.), 25.7% believe it is caused by primarily human factors (burning fossil fuels, changing land use, enhanced water evaporation due to irrigation), and 45.2% believe that climate change is caused by both human and natural factors.

Mr. Taylor, in case you are unaware, a “majority” constitutes 50% or more of a sample. In this instance, there is no majority opinion regarding the primary cause of climate change among the APEGA members who responded to the survey. Once again you are misinforming Forbes readers in order to prop up the Heartland Institute’s favored policy of free market environmentalism.

Mr. Taylor, if you have a good argument in favor of free market environmentalism, you should make it. However, your weekly attempts to mislead the public about climate science strongly suggest you don’t have a good argument.

Cara – The important thing about this sample is that it includes no climate scientists or meteorologists at all. And, it isn’t a sample in a polling sense. The respondents were self selected – much like this comment thread. The article is here: http://oss.sagepub.com/content/33/11/1477.full.pdf+html Everyone should compare the real study to Taylor’s description of it.

The other howler in the article is citing former TV weatherman’s “study” of the urban heat island effect…a non-peer reviewed joke from which his claimed co-authors distanced themselves.

Sir, I have read both the study itself and the APEGA report, and any discrepancy in numbers lies with the authors, not Mr. Taylor. The numbers Mr. Taylor cites above are taken directly from the study itself. If the authors chose to break the numbers out differently in their final report to APEGA, that’s another matter.

In addition, you have not addressed Mr. Taylor’s statements correctly. His point is that a majority of the respondents are skeptical of the need for dramatic intervention to prevent the rise of global temperature, NOT that a majority believe in natural warming over man-made warming. Of the remaining 40% of respondents not represented in the 36% that support Kyoto and the 24% who are in the “Overwhelming Nature’ frame, the study characterizes the respondents as generally not seeing the need for large-scale intervention, thus giving Mr. Taylor his majority of those who don’t believe that “global warming is human caused and a serious concern” This seeming majority who believe that significant human intervention isn’t necessary might give rise to the assumption that a majority of respondents don’t see anthropogenic global warming as a significant factor in the overall wax and wane of earth’s temperature, but this is only an guess on my part. And this is the question after all, isn’t it? Not whether man has an effect on global temperature, but whether that contribution is significant enough to warrant a change in greenhouse gas policy around the world.

To that end, the APEGA report itself states, “The highest disagreement (68% disagree) with statement “the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled”. This figure corresponds closely to the figures just discussed regarding the need for serious intervention. I see a trend. Do you??

In any event, regardless of who was surveyed, the report adds its voice to the growing evidence that there are huge groups of people, many highly educated in the sciences, who disagree in some way with the ‘science’ and policy of the AGW ‘consensus’. I’m among them. If the past 16 years of temperature stagnation,which blatantly defies the so-called ‘models’, is any indication of the ‘science’ that’s being used to drive billions of dollars of investment into global warming policy, then I simply won’t be party to it. Modeling is not science. Extrapolation from historical temperature figures cobbled together after-the-fact (since no one was measuring them by today’s rigorous standards, which would be required in any other scientific disciplines) is not science. This is just educated guesswork. And that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is given so little attention as a significant factor in the models is just irresponsible — science at its worst and politics at its very, very best. As my father would have said, ‘Foller the dollar’ — a lot of grant money is at stake if the numbers projected by the IPCC are wrong.

Mr. Taylor may be criticized for not making the source of the study clear in his article, no argument there. But you might have done a bit more reading before making such a scathing and condescending response. You clearly showed up here with a well-formed opinion about the author, and loaded for bear.

OK fair enough…but do you really mean to say that carbon dioxide is not a better and keeping in heat than other gasses that occur in our atmosphere. That is a fact. The specifics of how it will play out and what exactly adding carbon to the atmosphere will do, is largely guess work. It is really hard to say what it will mean exactly to our weather etc. But that it means massive and potentially dangerous change, which we are causing, and which we dont really understand, should scare you into thinking maybe its a good idea that we do something about it. Just an idea.

The fact remains that if you look in the longterm (100 years or more) there is nothing, that supports any claim that we are experiencing global warming. The fact that you cherry pick charts rather than studying all of them, means your claims have no merit. The average temperature of the earth is constantly fluctuating, warmer some decades, colder the next. Media was constantly running stories that we were headed into an ice age in the 1970s and now they are running stories saying the exact opposite. The only constant is change regarding the atmosphere. This takes away from important issues, such as pollution and trash issues. That is something we can fix.

The fact remains that if you look in the longterm (100 years or more) there is nothing, that supports any claim that we are experiencing global warming. The fact that you cherry pick charts rather than studying all of them, means your claims have no merit. The average temperature of the earth is constantly fluctuating, warmer some decades, colder the next. Media was constantly running stories that we were headed into an ice age in the 1970s and now they are running stories saying the exact opposite. The only constant is change regarding the atmosphere. This takes away from important issues that actually have an affect on the environment. Pollution is a good place to start

Wow, you did not actually read the article did you? Here’s a paragraph that should have given you a hint about the sample the authors used:

To address this, we reconstruct the frames of one group of experts who have not received much attention in previous research and yet play a central role in understanding industry responses – professional experts in petroleum and related industries. Not only are we interested in the positions they take towards climate change and in the recommendations for policy development and organizational decision-making that they derive from their framings, but also in how they construct and attempt to safeguard their expert status against others. To gain an understanding of the competing expert claims and to link them to issues of professional resistance and defensive institutional work, we combine insights from various disciplines and approaches: framing, professions literature, and institutional theory.

This is pretty classic denialist cherry-picking. The authors surveyed a group a geoscientists in Alberta that were largely drawn from industry. This is nothing like the Oreskes surveys which evaluate the position of a cross-section of experts and consistently find that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists accept the consensus. This is like surveying the tobacco companies on whether or not they believe smoking causes cancer. You also failed to contact the author of the paper for comment (I did, and pointed her to this coverage).

For those interested in what the study actually says, I would suggest actually reading it, rather than accepting this summary at face value. I would describe the paper as demonstrating that within a population of geoscientists in Alberta, largely coming from the oil and gas industry, there are 5 general ways of viewing global warming, or “frames”. The most common of these frames is actually the one most consistent with the IPCC consensus at 36%, that green house gases are the driver of global warming and we need to do something about it. Another 5% believed that regulation for green house gases was necessary even if there still is uncertainty or nature as a dominant driver of climate change. Other frames included a one based on fear of economic regulation (10%) that is largely hostile to the IPCC consensus, and another that nature was the primary driver of global warming (24%), man is insignificant, and these respondents used emotionally-heated language and religious metaphor to attack believers in global warming. There were also frames that could be described as fatalist (17%), global warming is real, but we can’t really do anything about it etc.

Those most likely to believe the “nature” and “economic” frames were white, male, more likely to be in industry at the upper tiers of their corporations.

So, to summarize, this paper demonstrated that when surveying a population, largely consisting of geoscientists and engineers working for the the oil and gas industry, the most common view of global warming (between 36 and 41% if you add the two frames) is that it’s real and we need to do something about it. About 34% of respondents were hostile to the idea of green house gas-cause global warming and the consensus science, and these individuals were more likely to be in the upper tiers of these corporations. Finally, about 17% of respondents said we’re screwed either way (the rest couldn’t be grouped or denied adequate expertise to respond).

In other words, it kind of shows the exact opposite of what Taylor suggests, and could not possibly be generalized to scientists as whole.

Data has consistently been manipulated by the Warming Alarmist crowd, so I’ll give this counter-balanced survey the weight it deserves. The original “consensus” report that is consistently cited by Warming Alarmists had a size of just 77 people, and not all were climate scientists.

The fact that climate scientists have in the past decade been bullied, sometimes with threats to never gain funding again through their institutions if they don’t come up with the “right” results (usually through grossly inaccurate and biased computer models) gives pause to all such talk of “consensus” on man-made warming.

The fact that warming has indeed ended and a cooling phase may be approaching is also worth noting. You know, because it’s fact-based, not based on speculation and wishful thinking.

And the consensus was determined by examining all scientists in the world who had published in related areas.

The peer-reviewed study that examined that data showed that the more a scientist had published, the more they were cited by other scientists, and the more they had worked in additional fields outside their speciality, the more convinced they were that global warming was real and caused by humans. Among other things, of the top 50 scientists in the world on the subject (according to those standardly used criteria for scientific stature), 49 agreed and 1 was ambivalent. When you looked at the top few hundred scientists, the ratio dropped slightly.

You can’t name a single scientist who was “bullied” as you say, because that never happened.

And the world continues to warm, even though most of the heat is going into the deep ocean right now.

Wow James, you couldn’t be more wrong on ALL counts if you tried. I’m sure you’ll scream denier at me, but the constant refusal of the Climate Alarmists to even bother to do simple research is alarming in itself. Have you even tried to google “climate scientist bullied” Here is a the first link to get you started. http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2010/03/cyber-bullying-rises-as-climate-data-are/

And you’r right, the ocean is absorbing the heat, as well as dissipating it, which is EXACTLY what many scientists said would happen, scientists from both sides of the fence. Using 150 years of data to make a computer model to give you a prediction on something that is 4.5 billion years old is like analyzing a teaspoon of water from your toilet and saying that is the makeup of all water on Earth.

Dino, with all do respect, but using google to do research is very unscholarly. Not to mention, using such a loaded and one-sided phrase as a search-term is practically the definition of “cherry picking.” You should really be cautious of what comes up on google when you search phrases that express an anti-CC bias, as various conservative think-tanks (such as the Heritage Foundation) have been spending millions to pay scientists to speak against global warming and they make sure to flood google with their bullshit.

That you think “Climate Alarmists” don’t do research is a very clear reflection of how ignorant and blind you are to what’s happening around you. Go to any college campus, and you can find students and professors who do NOTHING BUT research climate change. Try looking these people in the face and tell them they don’t do research. If you choose to believe they don’t, you are clearly distorting reality in order to vindicate your emotions. Your remarks on “150 years of data” also shows how shallow your research of climate change really is. Their models are based on far, far, more than 150 years of research, mostly geological indicators of climate that go back billions. Your ignorance of these studies completely undermine your atrocious toilet water metaphor.

Not to be a dick, but only the ice cores that cover a million or so years are really reliable, very little of the research is based on any indicators older than 100 million years….again not disagreeing with you, cause your completely correct, but very little of the earth crust is even left that is more than a billion years old. When your dealing with the people who support these ideas about how carbon wont warm the earth, even though it is experimentally possible to show that increasing carbon dioxide in a container when provided a heat sources, makes the temperature rise faster, you have to be careful will your language or they will use slight and minor items to try and make you looke like your crazy or lying.

” the people that know what they’re talking about still agree ” Apparently that’s not you. This ‘consensus’ allegation for AGW has been trashed for some time now – and was never more than an unsubstantiated allegation…rather like the idea one can predict the future. People who do predict future conditions are more realistic about assessing uncertainties built into overrated models for exploring process then promoted as realities rather than unsubstantiated guesstimates. Panel of Broadcast Meteorologists Reject Man-Made Global Warming Fears- Claim 95% of Weathermen Skeptical http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=CC160863-802A-23AD-4B10-571FFE8F3B76 That’s the Senate briefing BTW

Dude Broadcast meteorologists….are not scientist, they are dudes that tell you the weather on tv….and again the weather…not climate…..anyone who has traveled or studied the living world much can see the changes, pest species moving farther north than they ever have before, etc etc etc. It is beyond climate science it is visiable in nearly all of the scientific literature on biology, etc. Open your eyes and stop sticking to a story you love instead of what is actually happening…oo wait that would be science…

I’m sorry but forbes, being a pro no-limits-to-economic-growth advocate, is probably going to play down any risk associated with climate change. Plus, who knows where they find those climate scientists who say that global warming is exaggerated. You have a big conflict of interest and you’re using it in your favor.

Another completely biased and unbalance article by James Taylor. First of all the survey reported in Organization Studies was not intended to answer if geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis or not, but was an excellent article discussing a “philisophical/academic approach” by which investigators may want to go through to answer such a questions. The specific questions they ask is” “How do professional experts frame the reality of climate change and themselves as experts, while engaging in defensive institutional work against others?”

The selection of geoscientists and engineers was far from a random sampling, as clearly stated in survey: “we consider how climate change is constructed by professional engineers and geoscientists in the province of Alberta, Canada. We begin by describing our research context and the strategic importance of Canadian oil worldwide, to the economy of Canada, and the province of Alberta. We outline the influential role of engineers and geoscientists within this industry, which allows them to affect national and international policy.”

The vast majority of these scientist are employed either by the oil industry or by the government in an effort to maximize sand oil output and profits. This industry is a heavily criticized industry in Canada for being the largest source of Canadian greenhouse gases. Thus scientist surveyed from this region of Canada may be biased on average due to the industries importance to the their own employment, the local economy, and national pride. This is quite expected and understandable, but far from representative of geoscientists and engineers from around the world.

You can spin it any way you like, but so can any one else. For example, if just looking at the survey results in the article without context, one can say that “99% of scientist believe global warming is occurring” or “64% of scientist believe global warming is man-made”. However playing with number out of context, as you did, is a highly biased and unprofessional representation of the data and does not at all represent the question, intent, or interpretation presented by the authors.

You claim in many post of unbalanced reporting by the so-called alarmist and global warming believers, yet you commit the same “sin” that you advocate against. Sad, sad, reporting.

this is as silly as saying that 4 out of 5 dentists recommend charmin toilet paper. none of these people are climatologists; what they think is irrelevant. would you ask your mailman about your plumbing? how stupid does forbes thinks its readers are?

The study does not set out to re-establish the notion of consensus over climate science.

The study is not a survey of climate scientists, it is a mixture of folks involved with mining in Alberta.

The 36% figure JT uses to defame the overwhelming scientific consensus is totally misleading – the 36% actually represents the dominant group of respondees to the survey. This 36% – the dominant group of miners in Canada – felt that climate change was caused by humans and we need to do something immediately.

Not even close. Every response so far is based on actual reading of the paper, and how it doesn’t show what Taylor suggests. The paper is legit, the survey is legit, it’s interpretation by Taylor is an outrageous misrepresentation of the author’s findings.

I find your headline citing the “Majority of Scientists Skeptical” to be a wee bit misleading.

If you read the study, you’ll find that the scientists polled are all members of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists in Alberta (APEGA).

According to the study’s authors, “The petroleum industry – through oil and gas companies, related industrial services, and consulting services – is the largest employer, either directly or indirectly, of professional engineers and geoscientists in Alberta…These professionals and their organizations are regulated by a single professional self-regulatory authority –APEGA.”

Given that the vast majority of participants in the poll are directly employed not just by the petroleum industry, but by a sector of the industry involved in one of the dirtiest methods of petroleum extraction (tar sands), it doesn’t seem at all surprising that an inordinate number of them would doubt the danger of climate change, or feel that it’s unlikely to impact them personally. (Especially given the fact that Alberta is hardly at risk from rising sea levels.)

What’s telling is that a very large percentage of them (36%) are nevertheless highly concerned about climate change. One wonders how they sleep at night.

It would be interesting to see the results of a similar poll taken amongst engineers and geoscientists in, say, Bangladesh.

Survey an association of engineers and geoscientists primarily involved in the fossil fuels business and generalise to all scientists. Sound methodology. That’s why I get my science from the scientific literature not from a business magazine. Come to think of it, I wonder if I should trust a magazine that far into la-la land even in its own area of speciality.

Wow! What a *HORRIBLY* misleading title. The “majority of scientists” was a majority of “professional experts in petroleum and related industries” (i.e. biased individuals) and NOT a sampling of scientists as a whole. Further, the study was to find how they “construct and attempt to safeguard their expert status against others” — not to shed ANY light on the validity of the “Global Warming Crisis” as the article clearly tries to imply. SHAME ON YOU!

This is the kind of study that is detrimental to the public’s understanding of global warming. The survey includes only 1,077 geoscientists, and since geoscience spans a vast multitude of fields, many geoscientists are not well informed about climate issues, as it has little relevance to their daily work. Below is a link to a very thorough and unbiased study from Berkley, which was carried out to see if there was any validity to the doubts many skeptics had concerning global warming.

What a shocking piece of journalism! This is way below the standards of Forbes. Who is paying who to allow this onto Forbes? I thought you had journalistic standards to uphold, if you think the title of this piece is an accurate representation of the facts then Forbes time as respected journalists is over.

I would be sincerely pleased if you could have someone, knowledgeable about science, write these articles. Science works on evidence for or against hypotheses, not consensus. “Consensus” is not a legitimate part of science: it is a political concept. When the consensus of astronomers were against him, Galileo had evidence that not everything orbited the earth. The consensus, which was political-religious, sentenced him to life confinement in his domicile. When everyone believed that Newton had been wrong about light being particles, a single experiment by Einstein (won his Nobel prize) proved that light was a series of particles. The sooner we stop using the word “consensus” with respect to climate the closer to scientific understanding we will be.

The fact that AGW has been the consensus for decades is not a coincidence or a contrivance — it’s the result of thousands of scientists all over the world looking at hard data and being forced to the same conclusion by the weight of evidence.

“Science works on evidence for or against hypotheses, not consensus. “Consensus” is not a legitimate part of science: it is a political concept. When the consensus of astronomers were against him, Galileo had evidence that not everything orbited the earth. The consensus, which was political-religious, sentenced him to life confinement in his domicile.”

This is incorrect, on both philosophical and historical grounds. Galileo did in fact persuade scientists about his views. It was the Church which imprisoned him (guess what, astronomers weren’t imprisoning anybody).

“This is incorrect, on both philosophical and historical grounds. Galileo did in fact persuade scientists about his views. It was the Church which imprisoned him (guess what, astronomers weren’t imprisoning anybody).” Barry DeCicco peddles myth and pseudo-history about Galileo. He did not “persuade scientists” (how many? which ones?) at the time of his trial, but much later. In his generation there was massive resistance by the non-religious Aristotelian establishment in European universities, while significant elements within the Church supported him, including the Pope (before they had a personal falling-out). Galileo polarized both the Church and the secular intelligentsia, and his trial (albeit before the Inquisition) resulted from politics inside the Church, which reflected the political situation in general, as the Church in those days was as involved as the State in everyday governance; and on a more personal level, from Galileo’s insulting depiction of the Pope in his book Two New Sciences. DeCicco is just another of the ilk of Left-Nazi (same thing) pseudo-intellectuals who hold themselves out as know-it-alls without REALLY checking the facts, but in reality know nothing-at-all. BTW, if the authors of the study cited “are … interested in the positions [Albertan geoscientists] take towards climate change and … also in how they construct and attempt to safeguard their expert status against others … [t]o gain an understanding of the competing expert claims and to link them to issues of professional resistance and defensive institutional work”, then turnabout is fair play, and the same political and social causes are at work in the behaviour of “climate scientists”. Surveying the latter about global warming is like surveying the medical establishment about their cut-burn-poison approach to cancer treatment, which, notwithstanding its abysmal record and the widespread skepticism about its efficacy, they aggressively defend by slandering and suppressing alternatives that do not enrich or empower the cancer establishment and their Big Pharma allies.

You’re right, it’s not a coincidence or a contrivance. AGW has been the consensus for decades as a result of thousands of scientists all over the world looking for grant money to pay for their careers, and being forced to the same conclusion: ‘We have to keep hyping this crap, even though we now suspect it’s bogus, because if we don’t the whole organization will go under. Now get over there and ‘revise’ those numbers for the latest global temperature projection!’

You clearly know squat about scientists or how scientific careers are made.

If a scientist could produce results that invalidated global warming (or germ theory or quantum mechanics or thermodynamics or general relativity or any other established theory) they would jump at the chance — it would be the opportunity of a hundred lifetimes, the kind of thing that wins Nobel prizes and makes you immortalized.

Any one of the top hundred or so climate scientists could easily triple their salaries by selling out to the fossil fuel industry and peddling lies for them. The fact that so few do is a testament to a general propensity for honesty among scientists and to the institutional strength of science in weeding out liars.

It is very, very, very, very hard to publish lies about nature when anyone, anywhere, with any agenda can replicate your experiments and reveal your deception.

Both my parents where scientists , who did research with PHDs….disproving other people is pretty much their favorite thing to do. And money telling you what the facts are is the main reason many scientists avoid politics. It is specifically the reason my parents both sited for going into research instead of business or politics…they hated that the facts didnt matter on the money did when they tried to talk to politicians and business people. It drove them nuts. That is how many if not the majority of scientists are, to get them to agree to something just for the money would be nearly impossible. Managing PHDs is like herding cats, anyone who has spent much time will tell you. For the majority in a field to agree on anything, takes a nearly impossible level of evidence, and even then they will spend most of their free time arguing the details.

OMG, James, you’ve outdone yourself AGAIN! The article you discuss here was trying to understand the opinions of “professional experts employed in the petroleum industry”, so it surveyed engineers and geoscientists employed in that industry! These are not primarily “scientists”–in the sense of objective reporters of empirical evidence–but “professionals” hired to carry out the tasks assigned to them by their employers. OF COURSE these people “are more likely to be sceptical of the IPCC and of anthropogenic climate change.” Not news.

What bothers me…and what should at least jiggle at your conscience, is the way you take the findings of a balanced piece of opinion/discourse research and turn it into an abjectly partisan and skewed piece of research and use it for your purposes (and the purposes of YOUR employer) without regard for the truth or the consequences of continued “spin.” Your columns are taken as “evidence” by deniers of ACC because they trust you to tell it like it is. (Gullibility seems especially rampant among your readers.) Unfortunately, you have no desire to speak the truth… You merely try to APPEAR to be using “research” in a truthful manner.

In other words, James, you’re a shyster of the worst kind. And your grandchildren and mine will not forgive you for it.

Thank you for the attention you are giving to our research and continuing the discussion about how professional engineers and geoscientists view climate change. We would like to emphasize a few points in order to avoid any confusion about the results.

First and foremost, our study is not a representative survey. Although our data set is large and diverse enough for our research questions, it cannot be used for generalizations such as “respondents believe …” or “scientists don’t believe …” Our research reconstructs the frames the members of a professional association hold about the issue and the argumentative patterns and legitimation strategies these professionals use when articulating their assumptions. Our research does not investigate the distribution of these frames and, thus, does not allow for any conclusions in this direction. We do point this out several times in the paper, and it is important to highlight it again.

In addition, even within the confines of our non-representative data set, the interpretation that a majority of the respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of global warming is simply not correct. To the contrary: the majority believes that humans do have their hands in climate change, even if many of them believe that humans are not the only cause. What is striking is how little support that the Kyoto Protocol had among our respondents. However, it is also not the case that all frames except “Support Kyoto” are against regulation – the “Regulation Activists” mobilize for a more encompassing and more strongly enforced regulation. Correct interpretations would be, for instance, that – among our respondents – more geoscientists are critical towards regulation (and especially the Kyoto Protocol) than non-geoscientists, or that more people in higher hierarchical positions in the industry oppose regulation than people in lower hierarchical positions.

All frequencies in our paper should only be used to get an idea of the potential influence of these frames – e.g. on policy responses. Surely the insight that those who oppose regulation tend to have more influence on policy-making than the supporters of the Kyoto Protocol should not come as a surprise after Canada dropped out of the protocol a year ago.

But once again: This is not a representative survey and should not be used as such!

We trust that this clarifies our findings. Thank you again for your attention.

While you may have read the paper, did you read the article? I’m not sure where one could find a lie in there. The majority of the article simply quotes the study or paraphrases what the original study said (you would know that if you really HAD read the study, as I did). If you would like to take umbrage with the writer for not saying that the respondents worked in the petroleum industry, that may be the only ‘omission of truth’, but the fact that 36% of them still feel strongly enough about AGW to support ‘Comply With Kyoto’ sort of undermines any argument about workers in the petroleum industry marching in lockstep to the anti-AGW point-of-view. And while I respect the study authors’ statement above about using their data to make generalized statements, it’s very easy to see that Mr. Taylor is not using the data to make statements about scientists in general, he is simply summarizing the findings of the study of these particular respondents. The fact that he doesn’t say,” the scientists in this survey’ every time he references the respondents is perfectly in line with general writing protocol of this nature — that the ‘scientists’ he references are the ones in the survey is assumed as one reads the article. His point at the end is that in this survey we have an example of what happens when you actually ask the scientists what they think, as with the other two surveys he cites in the article. Again, I don’t see where he is trying to extrapolate beyond what is shown in the study. Would you care to pony up some examples of where Mr. Taylor has lied, or are you content to point fingers, then run and hide?

How about this gem: “Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. ”

The survey was not peer-reviewed, and the respondents were self-selected petroleum engineers, not geoscientists.

There’s certainly nothing subjective about peer review is here? I remember working for a hibernation scientist who couldn’t get anything published because the journal reviewer was his biggest competitor. Just see how it advances your scientific career to challenge the current orthodoxy. Come to think about it the case of TD Lysenko springs to mind.

The fact is, it doesn’t matter what you believe. Climate change is real; it is happening, the problem has resulted from human activities (primarily the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests), and we’re in trouble.

That’s absurd. By your reasoning, Einstein never could have convinced people of special or general relativity, quantum mechanics would have been strangled at its birth, the efficacy of penicillin never would have been recognized.

The cold hard evidence is that peer-review by scientific bodies is THE most successful route to truth about the world that has ever been discovered. Nothing else comes remotely close.

I’m just pointing that out in case you missed every scientific advance since the 14th century.

While I don’t agree with Brock2118′s statement, he is right in the sense that the peer reviewed process can produce conformity. In my particular field of science there were only 3 research groups globally working on our problem, meaning that our arch competitors were almost always sitting on the review board of our submitted publications. In some fields peer review can slow progression to new and better ideas, but it is still better than the alternative, which is non-peer review, or peer review by those ill equipped to do so.

There’s nothing ‘pretty simple’ about predicting the earth’s climate. And extrapolation is not science, nor are climate models. They are EDUCATED GUESSES. That’s why earth’s temperature has not been doing as it was told to do by the model for the past 16 years. There are so many factors involved in earth’s temperature, that if human beings make one small mistake in the data used for the model, the whole ‘extrapolation’ process is screwed. A little mistake like –oops!– overlooking the significance of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation as an overwhelmingly important factor to consider in the model. Factoring that in would likely have created a temperature curve on the graph that approximated what has actually happened since 1997. From that more accurate data we might have completely changed our world environmental policy from what it is today. Tiny mistakes, big, big consequences. Not simple at all.

The fact that extra CO2 in the atmosphere will cause warming follows directly from basic quantum theory and thermodynamics. This was proved over a century ago.

Those theories also predict the additional warming that will be caused in an atmosphere that has water vapor at equilibrium with an ocean.

Computing all the following consequences of that initial warming is complex, and increasingly so as you get to smaller regions of time and space, but the basic starting point is drop-dead simple to compute.

The only way you can add CO2 and avoid global warming is to produce appropriate negative feedbacks to cancel that initial warming. Scientists have tried for decades to do exactly that and every attempt to do has been a total failure — their predictions are not just off by a little but are wildly and dramatically wrong, with odds down around one in a trillion of being correct.

So you can go with the theories based on solid scientific foundations, endorsed by every scientific organization on earth, and capable of quite good (but obviously not perfect) predictions, or you can go with the theories that introduce ad-hoc fudge factors and deus-ex-machina solutions, are accepted by NO scientific organizations, and are wildly, wildly incorrect in their predictions. It’s more than a bit silly to reject the former for the latter because the former is wrong in the second decimal place of some prediction.

Here’s another interesting piece of information. This web site has a petition signed by 31,000+ scientists. http://www.oism.org/pproject/ The petition states in part… “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

There are virtually no scientists on it. In fact, most of the people listed seem to be entirely fictional.

When I sampled 100 names at random, almost all had ZERO references on the internet (most peculiar for a so-called scientist). There were used car salesmen, a few real estate agents, a high school teacher, a lot of dead people, a dentist, a few mechanical engineers, but not a single physical scientist, let alone a geologist, let alone someone with expertise in climate science.

The Oregon petition was discredited years ago, along with the institution that was credited with it’s origin. In case you hadn’t noticed, the opinions of dentists, doctors, vets and mickey mouse don’t count. You should have the courtesy to read the comment from the authors of the report Taylor has lied about in this article and other excellent posts highlighting the obvious flaws in this article!

“opinions of dentists, doctors, vets and mickey mouse don’t count.” How about the opinions of the global warming messiah Al Gore? How could anyone take him seriously? What are his credentials as an “expert” in global warming? Zip, zero, zilch.

Global warming has been happening since the beginning of time. It’s nothing new. Wake up people. It’s a natural cycle and has very little to do with human activity. In fact, there is evidence of an ice age coming.

A few decades ago, after considering the issue for 150 years, most scientists in the world all came to the conclusion that our release of CO2 is causing global warming, which is adversely changing the climate. Since then, the scientific consensus has steadily gotten stronger. That’s how science works — it poses questions, answers them, and then moves on to new frontiers.

You might as well argue against germs or atoms or evolution or gravity — it would be equally absurd.

To my mind, this article like so many others misses the point – the question that needs to be posed is “how can the earth sustain 9 billion people?”. To do that, we need to think about different ways of managing resources which also have the potential to reduce the probability of 6 degree or even 2 degree warming – whatever the scientists think, it strikes me that if we want a decent future on the planet the risk of catastrophic warming is not one that we should take.

You can bet the 36% who are still clinging to the AGW CO2 scam angle are infested with radical environmental democratic leftists heavily involved in receiving or dishing out government grants to try and keep the fraud alive for ideological political purposes.

Gary, of the “1077 professional engineers and geoscientists”, how many receive funding from the oil and gas industry? They aren’t even scientists studying climate change! Thank goodness for government grants rather than private funding with strings attached!

Keep this in mind as well. Out of the 36%, how many are receiving government grants????? I researched this a while ago—if you are willing to say “man causes global warming” you pretty much have no problem getting the grant. However, if you are NOT willing to say “man causes global warming”—–good luck trying to get a grant. Gee, I wonder why!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gary, the only people asked were employees of the oil industry in Alberta! Read the paper, it’s all there in black and white. Taylor is deliberately lying and misleading people about what the paper concludes.

And that is just one line of evidence. It doesn’t include, for example, all the data about land and sea ice measurements, or satellite measurements of radiation, or any of the other supporting data.

“Hide the decline” refers to a decline in correspondence between tree ring data and thermometer data after about 1950. The problem was to keep a high weight for the good tree ring data from before 1950 while de-weighting the poorer tree ring data after 1960, also dealing with the transition (the decline in reliability) for tree ring data between 1950 and 1960. In other words, the goal of “hiding the decline” was to emphasize the good data from thermometers and deemphasize the newer poor data from tree rings, without ignoring the older good tree ring data.

Bottom line, the “decline” in question had nothing to do with a decline in temperature. It was a decline in correspondence between a good source of data (thermometers) and a less reliable source (tree rings).

It would have been nice if you had pointed out that the study was purposely restricted to just folks that reside in Alberta Canada where Tar Sands Oil extraction is a big driver of the economy. I think the point of the paper was to show how “local” social effects can bias the otherwise very high level of scientific consensus held by similarly educated people when things assessed “globally” and without the local bias created the presence of a large fossil carbon industry. So I think your story is pretty misleading…

David. What do you think the CLIMATEGATE SCAM was all about. CO2 levels were rising and the temp was not. LET’S HIDE THE DECLINE. There is no scientific evidence that prove’s CO2 has any effect on what is already occurring naturally in the earth’s climate. NOTHING. Other than the political wishful thinking of the democratic left.

So-called “climate gate” was entirely based on a distorted misquoting of stolen emails, as several investigations showed.

Historically over the past billion years, temperatures have always risen after CO2 levels go up, which is not remarkable since basic physics says that should happen. On occasion, temperatures have also risen for other reasons, sometimes releasing CO2 in the process, but those events just triggered more massive temperature spikes in response to the released CO2.

Basic quantum mechanics explains how CO2 molecules absorb and re-emit radiation. Basic measurements show the radiation coming from the sun and leaving the earth. And basic thermodynamics connects all of this. The essential idea was conjectured in 1828, experiments demonstrated it in the 1890′s, and by 1950 the physics was settled. But I guess if your knowledge of science stopped in the 14th century you would find all that surprising.

James MacDonald is a liar. There was no misquoting of the emails AT ALL, and whether they were “stolen” or not is an irrelevant ad hominem red herring intended to prejudice the search for truth. The claim that temps have always risen after CO2 levels rise is also a bald-faced lie — CO2 levels have been steadily dropping for the past 500 million years, yet world temp averages have cycled randomly between essentially two non-linear “attractors”, one being the current temp and the other being roughly 10C higher (see http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html … note particularly the CO2-temp relationship during the Permian and Triassic). The rudimentary physics cited by MacDonald proves nothing but that CO2 re-emission has some non-zero effect — however negligible it may be — on temp. The likes of MacDonald are forever applying linear logic to a non-linear phenomenon. Layman might want to read James Gleick’s book “Chaos” for a non-technical intro to non-linear dynamics. The above dishonest posting just goes to show how climate Nazis have no scruples about fabricating factoids as they go along, enforcing their lies with bully tactics like insulting your intelligence e.g. “if your knowledge of science stopped in the 14th century” when his own “knowledge” of science is essentially nil.

The emails were clearly quoted out of context. E.g., spawn44 quoted “hide the decline” out of context and apparently trying to imply that it referred to a decline in temperature. Others refer to “trick” as if it denotes something underhanded instead of simply meaning “trick of the trade”. And all of those accusations were proven (several times by several groups) to be baseless.

The fact that the emails were stolen is entirely relevant, since it goes to the motive of the liars that then extracted misleading quotes from them.

Naively looking at temperatures over 500 million years is also misleading, since changes in the heat from the sun and the location of continents become significant on that time scale. For example, a few hundred millions years ago, the sun about 4% cooler, requiring about 10 times the CO2 levels to get the same temperatures as now. The presence of land surrounding the north pole obviously plays an enormous role in making ice ages possible, and events such as the creation of the Isthmus of Panama have profound effects on ocean currents worldwide. If you want to talk about the effect of CO2 you need to begin with the assumption of those things being fixed and/or comparable.

Finally, it’s simply absurd to argue that temperatures don’t rise following rises in CO2 — it follows from basic physics. That doesn’t exclude other effects such as volcanic activity, etc. This post is already getting too long for this forum, but to address the issue of Permian/Triassic temps, see http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past-intermediate.htm

First, the poll was not a poll of scientists — it was a poll of petroleum engineers, all from Alberta.

Second, although the poll was mentioned in a peer-reviewed paper, that same paper made it clear the poll was not scientific. Instead, some questions were posted on a website for petroleum engineers, and results were accepted from anyone who chose to reply.

Third, even given all this, a majority of the respondents agreed that AGW is real, not the 36% falsely claimed in this article.

I think that your headline is incredibly misleading. Although the paper you cite is peer-reviewed, the authors of the study admit that it’s not a properly controlled survey. Its purpose was to understand the point of view of a particular group – namely, engineers and scientists who work primarily for the petroleum industry in Alberta. Why did it want to understand their point of view? Because they were studying how to convince petroleum engineers of the reality of climate change. In other words, they knew, going in, that a predominant number of the people surveyed were not going to accept the general consensus. But even with that, a majority of the respondents accepted that carbon emissions play some role in causing climate change.

If Forbes thinks James Taylor is writing misleading articles – read back through some of his past ‘opinions’to see how often he has been pinged by readers for simply being wrong – then Forbes does have an option available. It can refuse to accept any articles from Taylor that haven’t been checked. Sort of like peer review.

Opinion is fine, misrepresentation of others such as in this article isn’t.

Nice try, slick. The day when you write an honest article and an honest headline above it will be the day when you will have earned the right to bullyrag your betters. That day has yet to dawn, Knapp. BTW, your own characterization of the study cited — “they were studying how to convince petroleum engineers of the reality [sic] of climate change” — proves that climate Nazism is all about fascist mind-fuck and brainwashing, and has ZIP to do with science. Big surprise that is. (A typical example of the tricky “logic” the fascists use is Knapp’s claim that “a majority of the respondents accept that carbon emissions play some role in causing climate change”, which is intended to prompt the uncritical reader to jump to the conclusion that a majority support the UN’s AGW political agenda, when in fact a critical and LOGICAL analysis of Knapp’s ruse would conclude rather that these respondents accept the trivial truism — which is not even in dispute — that CO2 effect on the climate is anywhere between utterly negligible and significant, without even reaching the issue of whether or not warming is ANTHROPOGENIC, which is all that matters. You’re slick, Knapp-baby, but you’re not slick enough. If you want to con people, try someone who’s DUMBER than you. That’s how it works.

Yes, you’re right, any group which tries to convince people who disagree with them to instead agree with them is “Nazism all about fascist mind-fuck and brainwashing”. You know, like pretty much every religion, public action group, political party, and most other organizations. As for the “tricky logic” how about this straight forward science. We can measure the composition of CO2 in the air, what different isotopes exist and so on. Some compositions are related to the “background” sources of CO2, others with fossil fuel emissions, the ones associated with background sources have stayed steady these past couple centuries, the ones associated with fossil fuels shot right up. The models predicting climate change’s progression from back in the 80s and 90s WERE off, they weren’t pessimistic enough, it’s progressing MORE quickly. The reason we in he scientific community are so heavily behind AGW, and are so interested in spreading this knowledge is because we literally believe that to do so is to try to save the world. The difference between this and religion is that we’re trying to save the real, right here world, and we have science to show both the threat, and the many, exciting, wonderful alternatives. Oh and here’s a simple read through explaining how humans CAN throw off the carbon cycle and mess with the atmosphere. http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm

This article is incredibly misleading. The study divided the scientists into 5 groups. On one end are the “alarmists” (36%) and on the other end the “deniers” (24%). In between are various levels of AGW acceptance. What is significant is that the alarmists are the largest group. This study is also significant in that it is not out of line with other surveys that put AGW acceptance among scientists at 80%.

It really is time for Warmists to examine some real facts about the Earth’s atmospheric history. Currently the average global temperature is around 12 degrees centigrade. Outside of the regular ice ages it has been mostly 25 degrees centigrade for hundreds of millions of years. Similarly CO2 content in the atmosphere is dangerously low.

Everyone should study the findings of the West Virginia Plant Fossil pages which are easily found with a google search. Ice Cores apparently are not as reliable as Plant Stomata – just follow the link to the Plant Stomata page.

We should be more afraid of the coming Ice Age which is now not that very far into the future.

Yes,in the ordinary course of eventswewould be slowly moving into the next Glacial although that is a long ways off. This current Milankovitch cycle is a slow one, the bottom of the next glacial is around 40,000 years away.

Anshumans weren’t around when the temps were at 25 Deg. Much of the world would be uninhabitable to us at those temperatures. And another whole class of species have never experienced temperatures like that either. Grasses. They only evolved around 30-40 million years ago and are really cool climate species like us. Why my interest in grasses? Let me name a few:

Right, Malcolm– why rely on careerists in the Alberta tar patch for climate misinformation ( You got both numbers wrong ) when you can get a whole alternative theory of biology from a rockhound who makes a living as a safety officer in a coal mine

Well, I hardly need to add my voice to the many others who have called out Mr. Taylor for misrepresenting the research study, especially when the authors themselves have done so.

But this example is yet another in series of examples of Mr. Taylor misrepresenting the science of climate. He not only discredits the Heartland Institute, he also brings into question the reputation of Forbes for publishing such shoddy journalism. A fact checker could have determined the problems with Mr. Taylor’s account with about 20 minutes of research.

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I’m wondering if you are willfully trying to mislead your readers or if you didn’t carefully read the paper you cite: What you somehow failed to mention is that the paper surveyed engineers working for the petroleum industry in Alberta! Is anyone surprised that the level of anthropogenic climate change denialists would be higher among this group?

He works for Heartland Institute. The tobacco and fossil fuel companies have spent over $120 million on Heartland and similar groups (Cato Institute, etc.) to mislead people about various scientific topics. Their strategy even has a name : a FUD campaign, for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”. The idea is to spread enough bullshit in enough forums to confuse the average citizen about the reality of scientific findings such as the link between cigarettes and cancer, or the link between burning fossil fuels and detrimental climate change.

Wow, I guess you were really hoping that nobody would actually read the paper you were using as the basis for you hyperbole.

From the article, “while outright disagreement has risen from 0% to 6% ”

So you could find a whopping six percent of scientific papers asserting that global temperatures are either not actually rising or that natural factors are the sole cause of increases. and this is supposed to bolster your case?

There’s nearly 11,000 results on Google for a search of the exact title of this piece, ignorant people skim articles and pass it around but the tactic works especially in the blogosphere. If they can use it to bolster their beliefs then details are unimportant to them, it’s soon passed around as factual and James Taylor knows that and by citing Forbes gives it some credibility….. how did this guy manage to contribute on Forbes?

The views expressed in the article are quite misleading and even contradicting one view with the other! The global scientific view was that black-hole is widening,ozone-layers are depleting,ice-burgs are melting leading to a chain of world-wide natural consequences,that includes global warming,wide-spread forest fires,floods,storms,hurricanes etall.Much of the causes could be traced to human errors or rich nations’ overwhelmingly producing certain gasses which could ultimately lead most of the consequential global warming or sudden changes in weather.Kyto Protocol Treay is mired up in global politics,and we now also find one country attributing blame over the other,but none is coming forward to take remedial steps for a greater good and survival of the mankind.Why Dead Sea is sinking at a greater pace, amassing salt?.Ecological imblances are spreading world-wide,and for that matter,this one-sided report is of no substance.

As a child in the early 50′s, I visited The Museum of Science and Industry and took a little interactive electronic cancer questionnaire. It gauged your percentage of risk for developing cancer over your lifetime. To my surprise, one of the questions was “”Are You a Commercial Flight Crew Member?” If you answered yes, it raised your risk level percentage. Later the explanation was that cancer risk increased because the crew’s ionizing radiation exposure was well above the general population.

Now remember jets were about only 1 year into the industry, so these values were based mostly on low altitude propeller airplane travel.

Fast Forward to the 90′s when I started flying wide body Jets overseas and I became interested in the risk of cosmic radiation exposure for high altitude long haul flight crews. Out of curiosity I subscribed to Rice Universities Solar Flare project. Rice U would send me email alerts every time there was unusual solar activity.

During solar flares crew cosmic radiation exposure can increase 10 fold. I was interested in getting info about solar activity during my long all night flights . Not sure what I could do about it, but I wanted to know.

What did I notice? Almost 1 to 2 times a week I would get a Red Alert or Yellow Alert email from Rice. This was unheard of. This was not normal. This went on for months and years during the mid to late 90′s. It was very unusual( No I didn’t buy a lead helmet). But why do I tell you this?

The reason I bring this all up is to say that during extreme solar wind activity the sun runs hotter than normal. Hotter Sun means more heat radiation reaches earth as well.

So is there Global Warming? Yes! But it’s not your SUV that’s doing it.

Cancer has natural causes (cosmic rays) and anthropogenic causes (cigarette smoking). So a concerned and well-informed pilot quits smoking in order to decrease the risk of cancer caused by cosmic rays.

Climate change doesn’t need to be exclusively caused by humans in order to justify changes in human behaviour that will decrease the risk of crop failure, disease, property damage etc.

Then, after the 90′s, the sun entered the longest solar MINIMUM in centuries, yet we had the hottest decade in 1,000 years (and arguably a lot longer than that).

Scientists are well aware of the contribution to earth’s surface temperatures from the sun. They’ve measured it quite accurately for a long time. During “hot” solar periods it adds a few percent to the heating from CO2. During “cold” solar periods it subtracts about the same amount from the heating due to CO2. On average over the past century, it has had a very minor cooling effect.

Your observation does not dispute the central theory of Global Warming, which is that man is *in part* responsible for the observed temperature increase. What you are referring to is another forcing which is already recorded and factored into climate models. Your point, while interesting in and of itself, is therefore a red herring when applied to the climate debate.

If professional biologists were surveyed in 1800, the majority would support the theory of “spontaneous generation” of life: the naive idea that worms are created from rotten fruit, instead of other worms. It took hundreds of years and the independent experiments of many scientists to convince the majority that this concept is wrong, even though it seems ridiculous today. Science isn’t a democracy where the majority wins. Unpopular ideas are reluctantly accepted, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

The survey was taken among a self-selected (=non-random) group of geoscientists and engineers from Alberta, Canada; who are employed in the petroleum industry of Alberta, Canada. The OBJECTIVE of the study was to learn “how do professional experts frame the reality of climate change and themselves as experts, while engaging in defensive institutional work against others”. It was pretty damn obvious that not many of them are going to call for immediate curbing of greenhouse gas emissions. That wasn’t even the point of the study. The author of this piece is either an idiot who can’t decipher an academic article or is a liar who rightly believes that not many of his readers will bother to open the original article, and 90% of those who will, won’t be able to make it through a boring-ass article on organization studies.

“James Taylor, managing editor of The Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News, recently wrote a Forbes blog post about a new study of professional engineers and geoscientists involved in Alberta, Canada’s petroleum industry. According to the authors of the study, however, Taylor got most of the details in his post wrong, and Taylor has not corrected or retracted the blog post even though his errors have been pointed out to him. Furthermore, Taylor republished his deceptive and dishonest post at The Heartland Institute this morning, three days after the study’s authors corrected Taylor. Taylor has a made a habit of distorting scientific studies in the past — his new blog post is no different.”

How do get this title =================== Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis ===================

From a paper that states this at the outset

====================== Indeed, while there is a broad consensus among climate scientists (IPCC, 2007a, 2007b), scepticism regarding anthropogenic climate change remains. The proportion of papers found in the ISI Web of Science database that explicitly endorsed anthropogenic climate change has fallen from 75% (for the period between 1993 and 2003) as of 2004 to 45% from 2004 to 2008, while outright disagreement has risen from 0% to 6% (Oreskes, 2004; Schulte, 2008). =======================

I used to worry about the global warmings. But then they said the mass of the Higgs Boson dooms us all. The universe may well end in 100 billion years and we won’t even see it coming because it will hit us with light speed.

Yesterday NPR ran a piece on the absolutely stingy behavior of meteorologists in not mentioning climate change any time the weather changed. The nerve! Later they said “new models” predict less snow but more blizzards. Oh, yah, the fact that there is more snow cover in the northern hemisphere this year-it’s not as deep!

It doesn’t even matter that “Scientists” don’t believe the theory of anthropological global warming. What matters is the Hard Data, for example the NASA scientist who came out in the Mid-90′s on Bloomberg TV and showed the ONLY data that measured ALL earth temperatures, including Oceanic, showed Global COOLING. You know it’s a scam when an ex Tobacco & Oil man jumps on board the Carbon Credit Con Game (Al Gorlione).

Can you please advise your citation of a management journal as being a peer reviewed journal with the implied scientific basis to reach the conclusion you are stating it made? Should we consider other non-scientific journals authorities in fields of expertise in which they do not work?

The sample is 1,077 self-selected scientists and engineers in Alberta Canada employed by the tar sands oil and gas industry. The article states earlier that “there is a broad consensus among climate scientists” regarding human caused warming. Those are the experts, not 1,000 guys employed by Shell & Chevron. The author used to work for the Alberta oil & gas engineers association. Garbage In = Garbage Out.

It seems obvious that their sample is bought and paid for scientists just as a good portion of our so-called leaders are bought and paid for by those who place raping the planet for cash ahead of the likelihood of a future for their Seventh Generation. All scientists aren’t created alike. Take for instance the scientists that question the 9/11 “official story” of planes disintegrating on impact and metal buildings burning and collapsing to the ground from a kerosene fire. Science is science; metallurgy is metallurgy. The only thing that skews these sciences is politics. Forbes in publishing this rot has cleared up what “truth” they represent: the truth of convenience that adds digits to their bank account. Forbes “writers” indeed! (at least you didn’t refer to them as journalists).

Do you only trust medical results that come from doctors who are never paid?

In the real world, everyone needs to get paid, and of course that can cause biases.

That’s why universities have a tenure system to protect professors from losing their salary if the publish unpopular papers. If you want to get your information from the source least biased by financial pressure, listen to them.

James taylor….. Can you expalin to me how you have the consius to write this kind of obvious embarrasing lies? Everybody knows this study is based on cherry picked oildrilling employess. Who do you think you can fool by this?

Ok just found out you are hired by heartland institute.. That explains a lot you are paid to lie, hope you are geting a good living out of it, all others will not.

@James Taylor – Where are all the peer reviewed papers by these supposed scientist poll participants? Who are the scientist poll participants by name? How many individuals were polled? Where is the actual poll text? Why are your links self referencing (linked to other articles by you)?

Appreciate the effort to present views of Earth Scientists, geologists, etc who better understand the complexities of deep Earth processes and how little we know about the magnitude of activity going on with plate tectonics and the potential impact on global warming. While most scientists agree that climate is warming and sea levels are rising, few honestly understand why. A slight increase in the rate of movement along ocean crustal, spreading centers would increase ocean temperatures dramatically, but no can even study earth movement deep under the ocean. “Experts” point to studies of surface volcanic activity, which is minor compared to mid-ocean spreading activity. Look at maps of where oceans are warming most rapidly and you will see they are located where tectonic spreading is occurring.

There was a time in my life when I subscribed to Forbes, but I haven’t had occasion to read it in a number of years. I am absolutely appalled by this opinion piece. It’s one thing to express your views, quite another to do so without accurately identifying your source(s). This is the most irresponsible example of editorial misconduct I have seen in a major publication in a very long time.

I did a little digging on my own, and found these surveyors contacted 40,000 engineers and earth scientists employed by the petroleum industry, and only 1,071 responded. Are we simply to assume that the other 39,000 petroleum industry employees agree? Or are we to assume that the other 39,000 petroleum industry employees decided that, hey, this is not our field of expertise?

Not a single climatologist was even surveyed for this study.

Aside from my own perceptions that summer here in Texas is at least 10 degrees hotter today than it was when I was a kid and 99 on the thermometer was an excuse for us to act like we were pieces of bacon frying on the grass, I can’t help but wonder what a freaking engineer knows about climate change.

Forty-eight years ago, when the public debate on the environmental implications of the supersonic transport planes being developed was in full swing, our high school was visited by a climatologist. He told us 48 years ago that we were in for global warming. When I put that 48-year-old statement together with the fact that Exxon-Mobil is the most profitable company in human history, I must say that waiting for the big “techno-fix” to come along is probably a casualty of executive bonuses, multi-millionaire monetary expediencies and just plain goofing off.

I have no doubt that, in the future, some Rush Limbaugh character is going to be standing outside in 144 degree heat, and from the comfort of his air-conditioned asbestos suit, he’ll proclaim, “What a beautiful day! The Commies were wrong again!”

Really, Mr. Taylor, your conscience allowed you to write that “Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis”?????

The study authors freely admit that they surveyed only the 40,000 members of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta. They freely admit that “the petroleum industry – through oil and gas companies, related industrial services, and consulting services – is the largest employer, either directly or indirectly, of professional engineers and geoscientists in Alberta….”

How uninterested in the truth do you have to be to turn this tiny, geographically and industry limited survey with a poor response ratio into your sensational (and totally inaccurate) claim that “Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis”?????

Yeah… I have to call BS on this one. Scientists studying the phenomenon all agree that yes, Global Warming is real. There is a minor debate that humans are causing it, but only a minor one… most scientists agree that it is real, and we are the cause of it. A recent study came out showing that we have just reached 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. And besides, there is no such thing as a scientific authority. It wouldn’t matter if no scientists claimed that the Earth wasn’t undergoing a climate change. The evidence is still there, and the evidence is pretty damn sure about it. This is no joke, you asshole. This is not something that you can or not believe and it makes no difference. It is our species, and every other species, that’s at risk here. We could all die, just because ignorant people like you couldn’t face the damn facts. Just because people like you can’t lift a finger, can’t do some work, or aren’t willing to give up some comfort, all of us have to suffer, and maybe even die. And next time please present the report as it is, showing what “scientists” were actually polled. Engineers in service to the oil industry don’t count as objective judges. Lying to get yourself killed… this is… unimaginable…

Regardless of who said what, Scientific Method requires the ability to prove the efficacy of a theory with actual laboratory experiments that reproduce the event. Global Warming caused by man increasing CO2 in th atmosphere is only a theory that is, of yet, unprovable by the Scientific methodolgy.

It is also worth noting that this was a self-selected survey. Out of surveys mailed to 40,000 members, only 1,000 responded.

So a more accurate characterization of this survey would be that in a self-selected survey of Alberta petroleum engineers, a plurality of the 2.5% who responded agree that global warming is a serious problem that is caused by humans.

This was my gut response upon reading Mr. Taylor’s article….that it was not “scientists” that were surveyed, but “engineers” mostly…and those who earn their living from carbon promoting industries. As a New Hampshire resident, I’m saddened to think that Dartmouth “educated” Mr. Taylor, who, as far as I can tell, is nothing but a paid “gunslinger” for corporate polluters and general industry interests who place corporate profits above people and environment. I’m hopeful, Mr. Taylor, that when you have children and/or reach an epiphany that your “corporate trash-talking” is having a negative impact, at the very least, on your own children if not others’ kids…you will apply your intellectual skills to a more positive and truthful pursuit !

Humans are part of nature. Man cannot survive with out nature but nature can survive without man. Like a colony of bacteria. Bacteria emit toxic substances that limit the size of the colony. Just as man does. I think the planet will balance out one way or the other with out us trying to control the climate. Climate change people think CO2 has a negative impact on the climate. I just can’t believe it after all I have read, and seen in reality. It just seems like some kind of taxation, money making scheme. On the other side of the coin we should be focused on the putting of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and water instead of spending a lot of time and money controlling CO2 emissions which is essential for life.

I think James Taylor is out to cause as much damage to mankind as he possibly can, either that or he’s just really stupid, which given his platform is equally dangerous. I guess I’m not helping any by even commenting on his horse poop article.

Everyone: follow the link and read the study that this awful article claims to be about. The study is unlocked and the link is above. Once you have read it, you will agree that James Taylor either (a) didn’t read the study, (b) didn’t understand the study, or (c) is wilfully representing the study in order to stimulate interest in his column. So, which is it: lazy, stupid or evil?

Lies, damn lies and sensational headlines. Here’s what this report really says (and what the headline should read if it was concerned with really summing up the news here): “Majority of geoscientists say humans are contributing to global warming, no consensus on how worried we should be” — in case you’re wondering how I came up with that it’s pretty easy if you put your mind to it. 36% of true believers, 17% fatalists and 5% regulation activists — they all say global warming is human caused. Where they primarily differ is on public risk and how climate change will affect their “personal life” (which is an odd way to look at it, since even most true believers would agree that it will be future generations that suffer for our mistreatment of the planet, not us).

This quote of yours exposes your bias: “Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.” Especially since ALL of the other groups consider it at least possible or likely that there is human cause. There is no group here that believes there is definitely no human cause! All of this taken into account, shouldn’t we at least be more preventative for the most part, and err on the side of caution? In the very least, it is quite obvious that pollution of air, land, and water needs to be drastically reduced, for the health of everyone & everything on this planet, no?

All shows there is a hidden agenda to the concocted “consensus.” The often quoted 97% of scientists agree” sound bite is a cherry-pick. Of the 3,000 odd replies to a mailout of over 11,000, they winnowed things down to 77 who identified themselves as active climate researchers. The “consensus” was based on the responses to 2 questions. “Do you believe it is warmer now than in 1850?” and “Do you believe that human activity plays a significant role in global warming” Rather loaded questions. 1850-getting out of the mini ice age. We do not want to go back there, do we? Significant – 5% ,90% ? We all know several skeptical scientists. Strange how they could only get 2 in their survey. Obviously, they had the result in mind, then played with the date to get the result they wanted. This is scientific fraud. The full agenda behind the fraud is treason. Good to see media outlets finally standing up to the pressure to only publish the warmist propaganda. Now to convince the People the whole thing was a giant fraud to begin with now that many have been brainwashed in to believing .

Honestly, this is garbage reporting for various reasons. First, as cited below, the author doesn’t mention the professions of the polled “scientists”. The scientists polled represent: “a survey of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta.” That’s only one of two large problems. The second, and perhaps larger problem, is with the massive distinction between scientists talking out their asses and scientists speaking as scientists. Scientists speak as scientists most strongly through the research they publish for peer review. The further you get away from their published work, the less you should listen to them. Moreover, the further they are from addressing issues about which they have published or to which they are responding, the less anyone should care about their opinions. Therefore, it matters not what “polled” scientists think; it matters only what relevant researchers publish to be reviewed by their peers. As for published articles, 97% accept or demonstrate an anthropogenic contribution to global warming: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm

That is a pure lie, 95% of Scientists believe that humans are accelerating climate change. Forbes is full of lies and propaganda, no wonder your company is reporting loss after loss.

Do some actual journalism by doing some research, being the spokes people for the Corporations aint going to help youll be profitable, they are not going to give you money just because you are the water boy, all they do is laugh at your ignorance. Your business model will fail, I will give 20 years at max to this business model ie propaganda hiding behind “journalism”.

Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, Jct: Incredible that despite the 15 year break-off of the hockey stick graph that any real scientists would still believe mann-made global warming. And not acknowledging they used Mike Mann’s “trick to hide the decline” is willful ignorance or complicity in the fraud.

Nice, finally telling it like it is. Any honest scientist that has looked at the actual evidence would realise that it’s a scam. There simply is ZERO evidence supporting the alarmists:

The Earth has been warming steadily for 300 years, well before humans could’ve had any impact, and not warmed for the past 17 years despite rising CO2! CO2 lags 800 years behind temperature rise in the climate record showing that temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The medieval Warm period was warmer than today despite much lower CO2 levels. CO2science.org provides comprehensive collation of studies around the globe and has found it was hotter.

Arctic ice is near ‘normal’, more than the extent in 2007, and Antarctic ice is above normal levels, a fact they omit in the news. You might have heard about the hilarious irony as climate scientists are stuck in record Antarctic ice currently. Sea levels have not risen significantly for 60 years.Sea temperatures according to the ARGO buoys deployed years ago show no increase! there goes the ‘hidden warmth’ theory of the Alarmists.

Climate models and IPCC predictions vastly exaggerate warming. They propose a fictional runaway feedback effect as the CO2 heats up the oceans which then release more CO2 into the atmosphere in a vicious circle. While this feedback does happen to a certain extent, not only is CO2 a lesser greenhouse gas in terms of contribution, the greenhouse effect is counterbalanced by other factors.

The IPCC admits that GHG warming alone without feedbacks will account for no more than 1 degree over the next century. Empirical data shows feedbacks to be zero to negative otherwise we would have seen much more warming due to the CO2 than we have. There are negative feedback variables that the IPCC has vastly understated or ignored. For instance, the climate models vastly exaggerate upper tropospheric water vapour leading to understated Outgoing Longwave Radiation, and thus vastly exaggerating warming.

The models also ignore or understate low level clouds resulting from increased humidity that reflects radiation back to space and cools the planet. The albedo effect resulting from cloud cover corresponds to cooler periods in the climate record.

IMPORTANT!: The mid tropospheric hotspot that should be there according to the IPCCs greenhouse gas warming contribution projections is NOT there, proving the IPCC’s models incorrect. This proves a low Climate sensitivity and basically proves the alarmists wrong.

Lindzen (you might have heard of him, one of the top climate scientists in the world) has studied the climate for 40 years and has plotted the satellite data that shows that Outgoing radiation goes UP with surface warming, NOT down as the IPCC suggests.

Sea acidification is also complete rubbish as even if all the CO2 in the atmosphere was dissolved in water it would not even come close to approaching a neutral PH, let alone acid.

Corals, crustaceans and other life forms flourish with more CO2.

Add to that all the data tampering and manipulation, for example the Darwin tampering, the elimination of weather stations from higher altitudes, the attempted removal of the mediaeval warming period, and the bullying of scientists who didn’t support the AGW scam, in other words the bullying of scientists with a least a shred of conscience and morality and you have a 100% certainty that AGW is a scam.

Here is a video from a top Carbon modeller for the Australian government that you should all watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plr-hTRQ2_c&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNW0LC32wU&feature=endscreen&NR=1

The real political agenda behind AGW is to create a way to collapse world economies and increase centralised, global control of the world population, as carbon can be attributed to a wide array of industries and resources essential for life. The globalists that control western nations are implementing a world government and a collapsed global economy and the resulting chaos will leave world populations desperate and willing to accept a world government that poses as saviour for their predicament. The other part of their agenda of worldwide economic collapse is to reduce populations through war and starvation.

James Taylor? “I am senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.” The Heartland Institute is a whole subsidized psyo-organ of the oil industry that labels itself as a research organization. That just about says everything about where James Taylor stands and who pays his wages.

Why does Forbes lie to its readers? Just what sort of organization is it? The poll was of just one organization — a group of Alberta petroleum engineers — not scientists as a whole, so the headline is a flat-out falsehood.

Forget weather patterns, just look at the polar ice packs and ask; are they in a constantly decreasing state? are they prettu much stable? are they in a state of decreasing some and then increasing some? The answer should be obvious. Heat will melt ice and more heat will melt more ice, which is the condition as observed for the past decades. No increase is ever seen.

Forbes should be ashamed of itself for publishing such an outrageously misleading headline and article. Surveying individuals in the industries that are likely significant contributors to the problem and then obfuscating that fact, then presenting a conclusion that is not valid is disgraceful reporting. I will not be purchasing Forbes Magazine again.

Total Nonsense. This survey doesn’t even come close to using a random sample of respondents. Everybody ( except you, apparently ) knows that a large majority of scientists do suport the idea of Global Warming, and those that don’t are by and large working for oil companies.

This article just gives Forbes a bad name. I had no idea the magazine was this badly biased.

“To address this, we reconstruct the frames of one group of experts who have not received much attention in previous research and yet play a central role in understanding industry responses – professional experts in petroleum and related industries.”

That’s right. All these engineers and scientists surveyed work for oil companies. Seriously. Learn to read original sources for yourself. Don’t trust talking heads and don’t trust me. Read original sources for yourself.

First off, I’ll avoid commenting on the inherent hypocrisy of writing an Op/Ed piece on “scientific” research and move straight into excoriating Forbes for publishing misleading, clickbait pieces of dung like this. These are not scientists in the survey, folks, they are petroleum engineers whose livelihoods predispose them to negativism on anthropogenic climate change. Not climatologists, but the very people pulling out of the ground the fossil fuels that are considered the primary cause of said warming. Gee, no conflict of interest there, huh?

My God Forbes. Who are the insane people writing code for this website???????

I cannot tell you how many times I have just given up trying to view this site from 5 different computers using 3 or more browsers and it still does the same thing. FLICKER FLICKER– WOAH! WAIT! WEZA GOTS MO TO LOAD! FLICKER FLICKER OVERLAY POPUP BEGGING YOU TO GIVE US DEM MONEY CHECKS YOU GOTS IN DA BANK!

This is a survey of the opinions of particular scientists within the petroleum industry in Alberta. “By linking notions of the science or science fiction of climate change to the assessment of the adequacy of global and local policies and of potential organizational responses, we contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association.” AND “…we reconstruct the frames of one group of experts who have not received much attention in previous research and yet play a central role in understanding industry responses – professional experts in petroleum and related industries.”

I assumed you did not realize this and perhaps got carried away thinking you’d found the Ark of the Covenant. Then I noticed this article was written over a year ago and you’ve done nothing to correct your mistake. Guess it’s just shoddy journalism and/or outright lying then.

I realize that Forbes doesn’t claim to share your opinions but really can any person write here? I lost my comment, then I read below and noticed almost every other person below made it for me. So, are you intentionally lying, are you unable to comprehend what you read, or are you just lazy and presumptive in jumping to conclusions because you believe you are right?

By the way, you did not merely need to disclose that all the scientists surveyed are in the petroleum field, but part of what the study was doing was analyzing their “defensive frames”. That means, in case you don’t understand–how they construct their positions based on being threatened by climate change.

Your behavior is irresponsible in leaving this article intact, after receiving the criticisms below. It is hard to imagine how you are not embarrassed and ashamed in leaving your mistake (?) uncorrected. I have nothing else to add, the other commentary here has been clear enough.

This article is kind of preposterous: High school level deceptiveness. Expect more of a Forbes article.

1) The survey is conducted on Canadian ///petroleum engineers and petroleum geoscientists/// working in Alberta (known for its vast reserves of oil shale). The author intentionally neglects to mention these people work in the petroleum industry. Quite a stretch to call this a “majority of scientists”. I suppose it is true if scientist means engineer, and engineers means petroleum engineer.

This just in: Majority of doctors working for tobacco company say smoking doesn’t cause cancer.

2) Meteorologist survey are ////television//// meteorologists AND meteorologists are not climate scientists. Do television presenters represent the view of the meteorological community? Or the climatology community? I don’t know about you, but I don’t rely on the scientific expertise of television presenters.

It should be noted that several major newspapers and media outlets including the Los Angeles Times have recently changed policy that refuses to publish letters or scientific evidence in opposition to their climate change position. This position is that global warming is real, manmade and a looming disaster. “A false theory can be very useful in spite of its falsity, provided only that it is not erected into a dogma and presented as fact. Theories are essential to the progress of understanding in science because they structure experiment, research and inspire the asking of relevant questions. When facts do not support the theory, it may be modified and continue to serve as inspiration for further investigation. But when a theory which is tentative is presented as fact, it no longer serves to inspire questions but rather to predetermine answers. To my mind, this is the present position of climate change theory. It has become “fact” and to challenge it is to run the risk of scientific or political excommunication. In Medieval times, too, excommunication was one of the penalties for challenging the accepted view of things. At that time the test of whether any new theory was true or false was, whether it fitted harmoniously into the orthodox systems of belief and not whether it could be verified by experiment.”

The 97% of scientist studies agree as claimed by the University of Illinois professor or similar claims that only 24 of over 13,000 peer reviewed journals in the past 20 years have rejected global climate change are presenting theory as fact. These type studies have a very few respondents (statistically invalid) and have been repeatedly proved statistically invalid and flawed. Importantly, this type of dogmatic claim and other appeals to emotion are also presenting a theory as a fact. The KC Star recent editorial claiming “bullheaded Republican deniers” or the LA Times policy to muzzle any dissenting opinions from a scientific view, is quite naïve and in a sense, medieval as an approach. When you hear legitimate skeptical approaches referred to as doubters, “deniers” or other petty names, you are seeing an attempt to make their position as dogma and “excommunicate” those who hold a different view. The dogmatic certainty and emotion expressed regarding “global climate change” has turned this issue into a political red herring with religious zeal. Those on the left have done far more damage to this important cause by these outrageous, emotional and often politically charged claims. This is so very unfortunate as the consequences of the issue may be truly catastrophic and involve all of humanity. Cause and effect of our global weather system, over millions of years, with unknown human impact, presents an incredibly complex challenge. Skepticism regarding both the “cause” and “effect” of climate change should cut both ways because science and a critical thinking mind demands it. Emotional pleas of absolute and dogmatic certainty, false and statistically invalid claims, name calling and muzzling differencing opinions is hurting the cause of science regarding this important issue. Rather than take this inflexible view, responsible scientists, the media and citizens would due well to maintain a healthy skeptical view of global warming, the human impact as well as be concerned about this important issue. We should also keep in mind, over 200 years ago Voltaire said, “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Good advice then as well as for today.

It should be noted that several major newspapers and media outlets including the Los Angeles Times have recently changed policy that refuses to publish letters or scientific evidence in opposition to their climate change position. This position is that global warming is real, manmade and a looming disaster. “A false theory can be very useful in spite of its falsity, provided only that it is not erected into a dogma and presented as fact. Theories are essential to the progress of understanding in science because they structure experiment, research and inspire the asking of relevant questions. When facts do not support the theory, it may be modified and continue to serve as inspiration for further investigation. But when a theory which is tentative is presented as fact, it no longer serves to inspire questions but rather to predetermine answers. To my mind, this is the present position of climate change theory. It has become “fact” and to challenge it is to run the risk of scientific or political excommunication. In Medieval times, too, excommunication was one of the penalties for challenging the accepted view of things. At that time the test of whether any new theory was true or false was, whether it fitted harmoniously into the orthodox systems of belief and not whether it could be verified by experiment.”

The 97% of scientist studies agree as claimed by the University of Illinois professor or claims such as only 24 of over 13,000 peer reviewed journals in the past 20 years have rejected global climate change are presenting theory as fact. These type studies have a very few respondents (statistically invalid) and have been repeatedly proved statistically invalid and flawed. Importantly, this type of dogmatic claim and other appeals to emotion are also presenting a theory as a fact. The KC Star editorial claiming “bullheaded Republican deniers” or the LA Times policy to muzzle any dissenting opinions from a scientific view, is quite naïve and in a sense, medieval as an approach. When you hear legitimate skeptical approaches like those in this article referred to as doubters, “deniers” or other petty names, you are seeing an attempt to make their position as dogma and “excommunicate” those who hold a different view. The dogmatic certainty and emotion expressed regarding “global climate change” has turned this issue into a political red herring with religious zeal. Those on the left have done far more damage to this important cause by these outrageous, emotional and often politically charged claims. This is so very unfortunate as the consequences of the issue may be truly catastrophic and involve all of humanity. Cause and effect of our global weather system, over millions of years, with unknown human impact, presents an incredibly complex challenge. Skepticism as we see in this brilliant article regarding both the “cause” and “effect” of climate change should cut both ways because science and a critical thinking mind demands it. Emotional pleas of absolute and dogmatic certainty, false and statistically invalid claims, name calling by many of these comments and muzzling differencing opinions is hurting the cause of science regarding this important issue. Rather than take this inflexible view, responsible scientists, the media and citizens would due well to maintain a healthy skeptical view of global warming, the human impact as well as be concerned about this important issue. We should also keep in mind, over 200 years ago Voltaire said, “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Good advice then as well as for today.

It’s quite offensive that you assume your readers lack the integrity to not take your claim at face value without investigating the objective of the research. Really? You’re saying that most geoscientists and engineers in general don’t believe in a serious threat of manmade global warming because some PROFESSIONALS (by the way, scholars/researchers are the ones advancing scientific ideas) in Alberta, Canada don’t believe so? This is disgusting.

“Although there seems to be consensus that anthropogenic climate change presents a profound global challenge, policy makers and companies have opposed the regulations of GHG emissions. As Levy and colleagues (e.g., Levy & Kolk, 2002; Levy & Rothenberg, 2002) argue, business responses particularly in North America have been substantively ineffective, barely exceeding reputational and brand management issues. For obvious reasons, fossil fuel industries’ stakes in this struggle are high and, not surprisingly, they are at the forefront of the opposition to carbon regulation”

I wanted to highlight this quote from the research paper: ‘we reconstruct the frames of one group of experts who have not received much attention in previous research and yet play a central role in understanding industry responses – professional experts in petroleum and related industries.’ …only to realize there have been many more who also actually read the paper. The problem is, that there are probably just as many who just trust people like James Taylor without checking the facts he omits so blatantly, that you could call it “lying”.

First thing I looked for was the bio of the author–Heartland Institute–not even going to bother to read this. Just how much money does the Heartland Institute get from the fossil fuel industry to spread its propaganda.

They get about $5 million per year from the fossil fuel industry (mainly Koch brothers) and the tobacco industry.

In the past, their main activity was to cast doubt on the link between cigarettes and cancer, mainly with funding from the tobacco companies.

I suspect that most of the current funding now comes instead from fossil fuel interests.

Overall, the Koch brothers spend hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda, through a large network of organizations: Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, etc., etc., etc., etc. Plus they pay a lot of people to post “grassroots” comments in forums such as this.

So this was written by James Taylor, the infamous fossil fuel industry lobbyist, whose speech to industry execs was leaked where he was promoting just flat out lying to confuse people? He said the general public doesn’t have the “brain” to know the difference between lies and facts. People with brains should pass on this….

Forbes loses credibility when they feature such inaccurate information written by a lobbyist who prides himself on disseminating misinformation. Forbes should consider their reputation and stop publishing columns written by James Taylor.

Forbes should be more selective in choosing guest columnists. James Taylor is the fossil fuel industry lobbyist whose speech to industry execs was leaked to the NYT times recently – he was bragging about how he just throws out lies and the general public is too stupid to know any better. This guy is not credible and Forbes reputation suffers when they publish his lies.

Commenters are being kind here, but James Taylor is just a “pants on fire” liar. He even admitted it in a presentation he gave to fossil fuel execs when he was pitching his services to them. His presentation got leaked to the New York Times by an exec who found his methods offensive. He claims the general public doesn’t have the “brain” to distinguish between facts and opinions, so he just throws out some insane opinions to keep them confused. Why does Forbes continue to keep this guy on their editorial staff. He makes Forbes look bad.

James Taylor neglects to mention that this is a survey of APEGA members from Alberta, Canada, who are heavily dependent on the petroleum and tar sands industries there. The whole idea of the survey was to gain insight into climate change resistance by studying the responses of people employed by the fossil fuel industry. The article talks about how these individuals are more likely to defend their institutions and resist the scientific consensus due to their strong professional identity with the industry that is causing the problem.

James Taylor also misrepresents the results. Only 24% of the responders are out-and-out deniers; the remainder are either wholesale ‘believers’ (36%), fatalists/apathetic responders who know the climate is changing but feel we cannot effectively respond (17%), people who place a higher value on what they perceive to be their “economic responsibility,” which to them means continued fossil fuel production (10%), or those who believe we are changing our environment but don’t know what the truth is (5%). There is a lot of uncertainty amongst these latter three groups, and many don’t think they will suffer personal risk from climate change. The fairest way to categorize them is that they just don’t know. Yet, James Taylor lumps them all together into what he says is a majority, which is a clear misrepresentation of the research.

So, as I find time and time (and time!) again whenever I take a deep look at the writings of deniers like James Taylor, “facts” are taken out of context in order to support a predetermined agenda.

The authors of the original survey, in their article, say: “Climate change could irreversibly affect future generations and, as such, is one of the most urgent issues facing organizations.” This was the impetus for this survey in the first place.

Readers may want to consider exploring the original peer-reviewed source material here:

Yes humans affect warming, but how much? If you stacked 1 million pennies, the stack would be as tall as 4 Empire State Buildings, stacked end to end, almost exactly, (4983 feet) Let’s say that stack represents all of the effect from green house gas on the planet and you wanted to improve that by removing the human race… That would take 12 cents off the top.

You are pretending that O2, N2 and the other non-greenhouse gases are relevant, but they are not.

Only a few gases in the atmosphere absorb and re-radiate infrared radiation (i.e., are greenhouse gases), with CO2 and H2O dominating. Of those, H2O quickly reaches an equilibrium determined by the temperature, hence acts as an amplifier but not a forcing factor. That leaves CO2 levels as, BY FAR, the main driver of earth’s surface temperature. This is absolutely, irrefutable, basic physics. NO scientist disputes. None. It follows directly from two of the most solidly established theories in all of science: quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.

So that means, to use your analogy, that before the industrial era, for the entire history of the human species, the stack of pennies was about 16 inches high. Since 1850, we’ve added another 8 inches, and we’ll soon add another 8 inches, doubling the size of the stack beyond anything seen in millions of years.

Bogus analogies such as yours are designed to obfuscate, not illustrate. Add in the fact that you lied even within your own framework (it would be 120 pennies, not 12) and your dishonest intent is pretty clear.